The Inscription of Things

Reviews / Votes

With its rigorous scholarship and insightful arguments, this book takes the analysis of how things, words, and people were entangled in the Ming-Qing period to a new level of sophistication. It is a rich and substantial advance in understanding the place of a distinctive materiality in China's literary and artistic culture. -- Craig Clunas, author of <i>Chinese Painting and Its Audiences</i> Equally at home with words and things, the author of this affecting book reveals such trivia as inscriptions for inkcakes, inkslabs, and seals to be the stuff of literature of the highest order and, in so doing, affirms precarity as a condition of possibility and creativity. -- Dorothy Ko, author of <i>The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China</i> This important study advances our understanding of how readers, writers, and collectors in the Ming and Qing navigated the complex connections between the written object and the physical word while remaining sensitive to the complex lives and social relations in which their textual-material creations intervened. It will be essential reading for scholars of the literature, material culture, and intellectual history of the period. -- Bruce Rusk, author of <i>Critics and Commentators: The </i>Book of Poems<i> as Classic and Literature</i> Full of illuminating insights, this nuanced study of inscriptions on a wide range of objects will be an important resource for students of writing, material culture, and media studies. -- Wei Shang, author of <i>Writing on Landmarks: From Yellow Crane Tower to Phoenix Pavilion</i> This elegant study takes up a host of difficult materials to consider afresh the relationship between Chinese literature and material culture. Beautifully researched, The Inscription of Things will be read by historians, art historians, and scholars of literature who will particularly enjoy the fascinating sections on materials and technology, as well as the inspiring elucidation of densely allusive texts. -- Sophie Volpp, author of <i>The Substance of Fiction: Literary Objects in China, 1550-1775</i> This original, imaginative, and inspiring book contributes not only to a richer understanding of the media ecology in early modern China but also to an understanding of the enlarged boundaries of literature with its traversing of different material forms, discourses, and social functions. It is an epitome of excellent literary analysis-a great pleasure to read. -- Suyoung Son, author of <i>Writing for Print: Publishing and the Making of Textual Authority in Late Imperial China</i> It will richly reward those who pay close attention.....Grasping the epic through the mundane, this book teaches how inscribed things constituted speech and realms of literature for those who sought to talk through them. * Journal of Chinese History * Whether in terms of the breadth of materials consulted or the quality of literary analysis, Kelly's book represents an exceptional contribution to the field of early modern Chinese humanities....A must-read. * JOAS *